Monday, February 23, 2004

As the new owner of Catman Furniture (as of November 2003), I'd like to assure you that all Catman products are still available at many locations in and around Seattle, including Railey's, Bark (Ballard), Bridges Pets (Lake Stevens), Cats Exclusive Vet. Center (Shoreline), Eastside Dog (Redmond), Chirp & Co. (Tacoma), and Green Cottage (Fircrest and Gig Harbor). I can also be contacted directly through mywebsite, www.catmanfurniture.com, for retail orders and custom designs. All Catman products are made to the same exacting quality standards as they ever were, and highly in demand because of this. I hope that when you do need to replace your cat trees, you will contact me.

More bad news. Not only has Innotek discontinued the Puppy Trainer (previously known as the Cat Locator), but CatMan Cat Trees are being discontinued.

Editor's Note, Jan. 29, 2005: They're back!

The new owner of Catman writes

As the new owner of Catman Furniture (as of November 2003), I'd like to assure you that all Catman products are still available at many locations in and around Seattle, including Railey's, Bark (Ballard), Bridges Pets (Lake Stevens), Cats Exclusive Vet. Center (Shoreline), Eastside Dog (Redmond), Chirp & Co. (Tacoma), and Green Cottage (Fircrest and Gig Harbor). I can also be contacted directly through mywebsite, www.catmanfurniture.com, for retail orders and custom designs. All Catman products are made to the same exacting quality standards as they ever were, and highly in demand because of this. I hope that when you do need to replace your cat trees, you will contact me.

The original CatMan is a character from a small town near Tacoma, Washington, who made the toughest cat trees known to beast. A 10-year-old CatMan tree used by four aggressive felines looks better than most pet store cat trees after six months of use by one kitty.

The CatMan secret? Tough-as-nails sisal fabric wrapped around the posts (no wound rope, thank you), top-quality carpet in neutral colors, and superb workmanship. You got the impression that his product testing was conducted by a mountain lion. Expect to pay $150 for a waist-high CatMan cat tree and $250 for one of the six-foot deluxe models with multiple platforms. The CatMan wholesale catalog must have had 30 or more models, all of them obviously designed with cats, rather than people, in mind.

We have four CatMan cat trees in our house and they look great, even in a fancy livingroom or diningroom. The highlight of my CatMan experience was the custom cat tree he made for me some 10 years ago that has a plain wood, rather than carpeted, base. I needed it to outwit a cat, now deceased, that had been trained by a previous owner to use carpet scraps as litter boxes.

There are still some original CatMan cat trees for sale at the better pet supply stores in the Puget Sound area. Crown Hill Pet Supply on Holman Road in North Seattle has a few of the smaller slanted scratching posts and the waist-high cat trees (ask them to show you what's in their storage area, too). I plan to go out this weekend looking for one of the really huge cat trees, since these are apparently the last of this extraordinary line.

Monday, February 16, 2004

When it comes to Valentine's Day, there is no way a man, or a woman, can succeed in meeting any of the bizarre expectations--of romance, or of sex--set by Western culture. So the day boils down to a test of how well, how graciously and how creatively we handle failure.

My husband's approach is proactive: He sends an expensive, traditional dozen roses from an old-fashioned florist in his old neighborhood. The creative part is that he beats the crowd and sends them the day before, thereby giving me an extra day to be appreciative and sparing him a humiliating last-minute day-of dash to the supermarket for a bouquet of anything. I take the humorous approach, giving him what I hope is an amusing card and a fancy red tin filled not with chocolates but with his favorite low-cal bubblegum.

My friend Chris, recently separated from a longtime girlfriend, is dating a woman who has really put her stake in the ground about Valentine's Day. She won't have any of it. They went out the night before, and she refused to see him until 12:01 a.m. the day following. This works when you're dating, but as a longterm strategy?

As a source of stress for the single (the married get their stress from wedding anniversaries) Valentine's Day provides some of my favorite stories. I particularly liked one from an adventurous, recently divorced friend who picked up a package of lacy stockings at Nordstrom as part of her plan to entertain a new boyfriend on Valentine's Day. He was indeed entertained, but apparently more so than my friend. She went into shock a week later when she got her Nordies bill and realized that the stockings--now hors de combat--had cost her a cool $48.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

We are having problems with Socks, our 11-year-old longhaired tabby. Around 3 a.m. every night, he starts meowing. Little triplets of meows.

Socks has been meowing in the middle of the night for years, but usually there is only one episode, and it ends after you call out his name a few times.

Now, he has meowing fits about once an hour, and gallumphs madly around the upstairs (where we sleep). The other night I looked down the hall and saw him fly by a couple feet off the ground.

Socks, who was born in the woods to a feral mother and rescued by a rather clueless family, has always been a timid, nervous cat. He's not bright, but he has the "flight" response down to a "t." He fled the family (our neighbors) and after a few months of scrounging around moved in with us when he was about six months old. I couldn't touch him by daylight, but at night he'd creep up to the head of the bed and let me pet him.

Now he's quite a cuddler, and spends most of the afternoons sleeping on my desk or in my lap (he's part Ragdoll). But let there be the slightest noise, and he's off, with a horrible clatter of claws on the hardwood floor. You can't catch him, you can't pill him--you can't even find him. He is like a SF creature, able to flatten himself to a micron to get under sofas. Hours later, sure the UPS guy must be gone from the porch, he drags himself out from under a slipcover.

At our old place, Socks had been a real outdoors animal, living in the overgrown field beside our house. After we moved here, he got into the habit of going out only at night (with Betaille) or during the day when I was in the yard. Suddenly, about a month ago, he refused to go out at all. And the nocturnal meowing started.

My current plan is to grab him after he wakes us up, lug him down to the garage, and lock him in there for the night (where we can't hear him). The problem is, you can grab Socks only once, and I don't fancy nightly races around the house. Perhaps the solution is earplugs.

Monday, February 09, 2004

My inkjet printer sits on a shelf under my desk. It ran out of paper this morning, and I reached down to get more paper from the package I keep right next to it. And grabbed something warm and furry, that seemed to slither around my wrist. Tarantula?

For whatever reason, our big black cat, Smokey, had decided to stand on the shelf amidst all the printer cables, and just happened to be down there as I went for the paper. He was nearly invisible in the darkness under the desk. Shudder.

Saturday, February 07, 2004

It's the name they've given themselves. The Deaniacs. They were there in force at our neighborhood caucus, marching up to any poor soul lacking a Dean button and, without even introducing themselves, putting their intense little faces up to ours and telling us how pathetic our candidates are and how anyone failing to support their candidate is ignorant, selfish, pitiable, and might as well be a Republican.

The best offense, in their downloaded-from-the-web playbook, is a good offense--and boy, were they offensive.

There are plenty of good reasons to support Dean, but I can now say from firsthand experience that the company sure isn't one of them. (Of course, not all of the Dean supporters were carrying on like Deaniacs. Some of them, in fact, looked mildly embarrassed by their bedfellows' tactics, and when the appropriate time came to speak out in the princinct caucus meetings, were quite eloquent and convincing.)

I caught a few minutes of Ariana Huffington's comments on today's "Left, Right, and Center" radio program and she described Iowa Democrats as horrified by the brusque, arrogant behavior of the Deaniacs. She then goes on to attribute Dean's poor showing there to the Deaniacs treatment of the natives, though I suspect that's an oversimplification.

Our precinct awarded two delegates to Dean, one to Kerry, and one to Kucinich. I'm the Kerry delegate to the May 1 caucus (the next level up in the Washington Democrats' system).

Friday, February 06, 2004

Went out to get the mail this afternoon and there were three minature irises in bloom beside the mailbox. Later, when I let Smokey the cat out the back door, he jumped up on the narrow deck that runs along the back fence, went to his traditional summer spot beside the statue of the Hindu deity, and curled up in the sun for a nap. Finally, I looked out the window of my office and there in the neighbors' apple tree, instead of the usual crows, was a robin.

A couple hours later it was gray and rainy again, but now there's no turning back.

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

The Kerry campaign celebrated a five-state primary victory in Seattle tonight, and I was there at the downtown Sheraton with my mom and several hundred others ranging from the wildly pro-Kerry to the definitely-leaning-in-that-direction.

Kerry's campaign had manned the phones Monday night to invite folks to Tuesday's rally at the Sheraton, something they probably regretted 24 hours later as the event overflowed from the grand ballroom into two other event rooms and hordes clogged the vast hotel lobby.

It was a nice opportunity to get a look at the crowd, a mix of mellowed-out old radicals, prosperous-looking yuppies, well-heeled gen-X-ers, and folks from various unions. It was not nearly as ethnically diverse as I'm used to seeing in Seattle, which led me to suspect that Dean is likely attracting the more artsy, diverse and hip contingent.

Prominent Democrats in Washington state have flocked to support Kerry in recent days. (Everyone loves a winner.) The festivities opened with an introduction by Governor Gary Locke, who, bless his soul, gave us a economic analysis of Bush's malfeasance before bringing on the candidate to the beat of Hendrix's "Fire." (I'm wondering, is this the campaign theme or a nod to Seattle's musical heritage?)

Kerry came across calm, upbeat, and intelligent, making a speech that ran down a list of campaign themes. Support for veterans and unions got a lukewarm response; education, jobs, and healthcare a more enthusiastic reception; and the crowd went just wild for environmental protection, the restoration of first amendment rights, tax reform, and crackdowns on corporate greed. Yup, this was Seattle, not Spokane.

Kerry invited us on a journey to rediscover America, and most in the pragmatic audience looked like they were packed and ready to go. I may be better aligned with Dean on the issues, but I'll be at my neighborhood caucus Saturday at 10, casting my vote for John Kerry. The man's a winner, and that's just what we'll need in November.